Shattered World - 19 years in the making and dying

I am speaking on behalf of my favorite mud, Shattered World. I have played tons of muds. And none have ever come close to the awesomeness of Shattered World. It has had active development by real(that is to say professional) programmers for over 18 years and the results so far are quite nice. As much fun as the mud is, the playerbase has been slowly dwindling for years. The mud is down to its last players i think. Since everything in the mud is player run, that also means its falling apart. The economy is horrible, everything is devalued due to lack of demand. There isnt even enough active players to fill all the guild leader positions. So, instead of listing more and more ways that the lack of players is killing the mud, let me list some of the more prominent features of the mud.

* Quests that require you to use your brain, rather then the same mindless "go kill this mob" "go collect X amount of this" quests

* Multiclassing. You dont actually have a "class" you have a player, who can choose to join a guild. guild being the equivilent of class. You can be a member of as many guilds as you like, so long as they are allied. The leaders decide alliances.

* Massive world. Instead of pathways linking areas together, theres a whole massive world where you can go to any inbetween rooms. to help with navigation there are built in minimap, areamap, and worldmap commands.

* 3D world. Well, as 3d as text can be I guess, races with wings can fly, any race can swim, but only tritons can breath under water. theres a whole sky to fly around in. unlike a sky area that you might see in lots of muds. it just covers everywhere. ocean is very large as you might expect, and yes, you can and probably will drown at some point. when you're searching for your corpse on the bottom of the ocean, thats probably when you'll get what i mean by 3D world.

* 9 Races. I know, some muds have a larger selection. But our selection is fairly unique compared to most. Races - Arachean, Archon, Draconian, Galandrian, Grmkel, Human, Mephit, Triton, Pixie. Lets see, Aracheans are big spider things that can poison people and tie them up in a web. Archons are big demon things that take damage from sun and can sting people with their barbed tail or charge them with their horns, Grmkels are slug like creatures with the ability to turn people to stone, etc.... you can see the kind of diversity we get.

* A friendly player base. Theres not many of us left, but those of us that are here, try to help out new players however possible. that doesnt mean we'll hand you everything on a silver platter. its a hard mud. you'll still be expected to work for things. we'll just help you get aquainted with the mud and get the hang of things.

So, if you can manage to take the time to give us a visit, my name on there is Warblade. Ill be happy to answer any questions. Oh, and please at least finish the tutorials before deciding not to play? lol. seriously. you havent played if you dont make it through the tutorials. theres so much to do here. I didnt even cover alchemy, or ores, or leatherworking, or skills, or any of that. Some things are better discovered.

As much fun as the mud is, the playerbase has been slowly dwindling for years. The mud is down to its last players i think.
[...]
Oh, and please at least finish the tutorials before deciding not to play? lol. seriously. you havent played if you dont make it through the tutorials.

well, theres a couple reasons for the tutorials. one reason is that so new players dont get overwhelmed by how much there is to do, the main reason though, is to prevent people from making tons of new characters to get good stats, since player stats are slightly randomized upon player creation. The tutorials really dont take that long. maybe 10 minutes. It only makes you do 3 tutorials plus the choose a race tutorial(which is where you decide your race and gender and all that). by the way, if you choose the door you'll be male and if you choose hide you'll be female. Just so theres no confusion...

Greasings and sanitations,
Everyone tries selling the features, of their favourite MUD. I just suggest you try it for yourself. Shattered has been around for a long time, I haven't played many other MUDs but I've never found one that grabs my attention as well as this one.